


when i come down, i come down hard

by alderations



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Dissociation, Established Relationship, F/F, Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, and aurora is yknow a spaceship, nastya doesnt know how to ask for help, softer than the tags make it sound but still heed the tags anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26169181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: Nastya cries a lot, as children are wont to do, until she learns that it will only ever make things worse.(Mechs Femslash Week Day 5 - Memories)
Relationships: The Aurora/Nastya Rasputina
Comments: 9
Kudos: 48
Collections: Mechanisms Femslash Week 2020





	when i come down, i come down hard

_ Nastya needs something. She can’t remember what she needs, but it’s probably important, and if she doesn’t get it something Very Bad will happen, something will go Wrong, and she knows this as deep as the wires that run concurrent with her nerves. She also knows that no one will listen to her, because they don’t believe that something is going Wrong, and a princess shouldn’t need things so fervently when everyone else has important business to attend to. _

_ She clutches at the swishy, metallic fabric of her father’s robe as she begs him for whatever she needs, only to stumble and nearly fall when he brushes her aside. His voice rings garbled and nonsensical in her ears. Undeterred, Nastya turns to her mother, but her mother has been asleep for decades, dormant under the tide of electric dreams that keeps them all sated. She doesn’t understand why she is awake, when even her mother is allowed to escape the driving rain of Cyberian misery. Nastya cries, but her tutors pretend not to see her tears, and the robot weaving her hair into immaculate plaits doesn’t care. _

_ Nastya cries a lot, as children are wont to do, until she learns that it will only ever make things worse. _

Something touches her hair, and she bats it away absent-mindedly.

_ On her sixteenth birthday, she is formally presented to her people in the digital world, where everything is bright and colorful and sickly-sweet-pleasant and altogether too much for her. If her subjects whisper, the words bounce off the programming that protects her from physical harm without a sound. Still, their eyes are cold and their posture closed, but her father says nothing when she looks to him in distress. Her parents wanted a son. They were supposed to have a czar to take over from her father, not a princess to stir rumblings that even her parents can’t quell. _

_ By now, she has learned how to hold her tears in, or at least cover her face when they escape. After her debut, she chokes on her first waking breath, and stumbles into the bathroom to find her face red-streaked and puffy, yet still she can’t bring herself to cry. She doesn’t understand what’s wrong, and if she doesn’t know, then no one else will. _

**Nastya. Nastya.**

_ She doesn’t cry when she dies. She doesn’t cry when she shoots Yenin, or when she takes Carmilla’s hand. She doesn’t speak a word to Carmilla, in fact, because it’s not like she has a say in what happens to her. She never has. _

_ Things are… she hesitates to say better, with Carmilla, but they’re different. Most days, she still needs things, but sometimes they’re presented without her ever having to ask. Jonny stitches up the holes in the old Cyberian coat that Carmilla draped across her shoulders as they fled the planet. The ship—Aurora—floods the vents with heat the first time she curls up in the metal veins in search of the slightest shred of warmth. Even Carmilla seems determined to work out the flaws in her mechanism, foregoing all the rest of her experiments just to make Nastya comfortable for once. It makes a difference. _

_ But something so, so horrible has happened to her, something that changed her down to her fucking marrow, and she is drowning. It feels as if she’s run out of her palace, arms wide and mouth open, and now the downpour is cascading down her throat and trampling her into the ground, and no one is there to watch it happen. She doesn’t remember how to need anymore, and she certainly doesn’t remember how to ask. When Ashes arrives, things are easier—Ashes reads people like newspapers, and even if they don’t know what she needs, they know how to comfort her until she can find it on her own. That’s what she does, though most of the time it means sitting stuck in one place for hours, even days, waiting for the seizing pain in her chest to dissipate enough to let her move. _

**Nastya. Do you need help?**

She always needs help. She shakes her head, avoiding the cable reaching down from the ceiling to touch her shoulder. “I’m fine,” she tells Aurora, almost disappointed by how steady she keeps her voice.

**You are not fine. May I help you?**

The cable has withdrawn, but Nastya can feel Aurora watching her, feeling her reactions, living in her instincts. Nastya has been alive for hundreds of years. The muscles that make her head nod ought to be well-developed by now, but she can’t force them to work. “I. I’m… Aurora,” she manages at last. Every fibre of her being, muscle and steel, tells her not to ask for help. It’s the middle of the night. The rest of the crew should be asleep. And Aurora,  _ her  _ Aurora, doesn’t deserve this.

**I am Aurora. I am here.**

Nastya’s eyes burn. “I’m s-sorry,” she stammers, fists clenched but otherwise unable to move. “I’m sorry, I can’t—”

**You do not need to do anything. I will help you however I can.**

One tear squeezes out of the corner of Nastya’s eye, and she doesn’t know how long she stands there, fading in and out of reality like she’s struggling to wake up, before Aurora reaches a different cable down to curl around her hand. Nastya squeezes it with a monumental effort. She feels so heavy, so slow, her hands even colder than usual and her heart pounding like it can barely handle the weight of her quicksilver blood with every beat. When Aurora opens a panel in the wall to reach out to her, to  _ hold  _ her, Nastya watches her movements as if she’s buried three feet inside her own head.

**Is it alright if I touch you?**

At last, she manages a nod, and within seconds she’s wrapped in a mass of cables and cords, while Aurora strokes her hair and wraps her body in the gentle pressure that she knows will keep Nastya grounded. “It’s late,” Nastya explains. “Don’t want to bother anyone.”

**You are not bothering me. You are never bothering me, Nastya.**

Nastya tries to shake her head, but she just gets tangled in Aurora’s tendrils; the familiar tug of metal joints extricating themselves from her hair makes her heart swell.

**Given your physical symptoms and your emotions, you appear to be experiencing a dissociative episode. This is a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the DSM-XXIII.**

“Huh,” is all Nastya can muster. She’s not surprised by Aurora’s bluntness, or her apparent attempt at diagnosis, but her library could use some updating.

**The information in my database suggests that connection with others may support appropriate treatment. Would you like me to alert Fucking Jonny? He is awake.**

“No,” Nastya says immediately. “Just you. Please.”

**Alright.**

Aurora doesn’t say anything else for a long time, but she slowly pulls Nastya into the wall and wraps her in a cocoon of wire and sheet metal. If she were anyone else, Nastya thinks, this would be a deeply alarming process. But her racing heart starts to settle once she’s surrounded on all sides by machinery, and in the near-blackness, she studies the contrast between her pale skin and Aurora’s myriad of colored wires, her breathing starting to slow. It’s not fair that she should have so many memories crammed into one mostly-human brain, without any of the faculties to handle them. Safe in Aurora’s embrace, she lets herself feel that injustice like a needle in her chest.

**It is not fair. None of it is fair. I am sorry.**

Nastya sobs. This isn’t the first time someone has said that to her, but it’s usually been Jonny, usually shitfaced and cursing and barely aware of her presence, so it’s different this time. Aurora speaks with so much intention, her emotions fierce and unguarded in Nastya’s mind, and the pain is only compounded when she sees it through someone else’s eyes.

**It is okay to be angry. I will love you no matter what you feel.**

“Are you reading therapy workbooks now or what?” Nastya’s voice cracks.

**I do have several of those in my library, but my words are my own. You deserve comfort.**

She deserves a lot of things, and comfort is probably not one of them, but she doesn’t have the energy to argue when Aurora is unabashedly trying to rock her to sleep. Besides, she knows by now that sleeping helps—there wasn’t much else to do, when she had no one to rely on but herself. So she loses herself in the whirring of gears and the crackling of circuits, and she tries to imagine a day in the future where the throbbing ache in her throat is a memory in and of itself.

**I love you, Nastya. Sleep tight.**

**Author's Note:**

> "Angst day is over," I said. "I can stop using fanfic as a vessel for my emotions," I said. *honks clown nose*
> 
> I think one of the most tragic things about the Mechanisms (both the mechs themselves and the characters in their albums) is that almost all of them are victims of circumstance. They start out utterly helpless in the face of a world that only wants to tear them down, and they generally respond with senseless violence and general abhorrent behavior, but how often do they let themselves feel how unfair their lives are? Especially Nastya. At least she has a healthy relationship to provide SOME measure of comfort and at least, like, a sounding board for her emotions, but fuck. These bastards must be so repressed.
> 
> Anyway, hopefully you enjoyed reading this!! Come back tomorrow for the next installment of "I swear I won't just write about my own feelings loosely disguised as the Mechanisms, no seriously I promise, wait where are you going come back." Y'all leave the sweetest comments and it makes me so fucking happy. Find me on tumblr @alderations and twitter @alderwrites! I will absolutely take prompts. I'm so close to writing 50k words in August.
> 
> (also the title is from Sunchokes by Remember Sports which has been my summer anthem in, like, a really depressing way and also is a very good-sad nastya/aurora song)


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